Misha Glouberman: Edge of the spotlight

Every time Misha Glouberman, subject of The Chairs Are Where the People Go, walks into a bookshop, he finds the title in a different section of the store. Certainly, a grab bag of descriptors may be applied to this slim, 175-page volume; the book straddles the line between advice column, self-help manual, motivational speech, urban study, political screed, philosophical treatise, literary experiment and instruction guide to life.

Glancing down at the book, which is resting on the picnic table in front of him on a recent muggy afternoon in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Glouberman is still unsure of how to describe it. “It’s a very weird book,” he says. “It’s completely indescribable.”

Allow us to try. The Chairs Are Where the People Go is a compilation of Glouberman’s thoughts, opinions and insights on a variety of eclectic topics ranging from “How to Teach Charades” to “Seeing Your Parents Once a Week.”

“Sheila had the idea to write a book of everything I know,” he explains, before delivering the inevitable punchline. “It’s a very short book.”

“Sheila” is Sheila Heti, who has evolved into the city’s resident literary mad scientist. Ten years ago, the pair co-founded Trampoline Hall, at which people deliver lectures on subjects outside their areas of expertise. Eventually, Heti began to write a novel about Glouberman titled The Moral Development of Misha. It was abandoned after 60 pages, as Heti discovered she’d rather spend time with the real-life Glouberman than his fictional counterpart. She proposed the idea for this book, Glouberman agreed to participate, and together they came up with a list of topics he could speak about. Several times a week, he’d leave the Queen Street West apartment he shares with his partner, artist Margaux Williamson — who coincidentally appeared as a character in Heti’s 2010 novel How Should a Person Be? — and stop by Heti’s apartment. She’d make coffee, they’d sit at the kitchen table, and he’d talk while she transcribed, like a court reporter. There were no ground rules, and very little was edited out of the final version. The
result, Heti says, is “a book about everything Misha knows.”

Well, almost.

“Of course, it’s not every single thing I know,” Glouberman says, laughing. “Just things I know about the TV show M*A*S*H could probably fill up a volume if I really thought about all of them.”

While Glouberman does not address any long-running medical comedies set during the Korean War, he does discuss such disparate subjects as negotiation, nimbyism, noise music, monogamy, Robert McKee, friends, absenteeism, the gym, manners, improvisation, Spam, Harvard, miscommunication, happiness, Kensington Market, the Queen-Beaconsfield Residents’ Association (of which he was a founding member) and why, in his view, “wearing a suit all the time is a good way to quit smoking.”

Glouberman requires almost as many descriptors as the book; for much of the past decade, he has been a crossing guard at the intersection between arts, culture and politics in Toronto. Though he’s often seen in public moderating panels or hosting Q&As, this time he’s the one giving his opinions. He describes the book as “my Trampoline Hall lecture.”

“I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life, not exactly consciously, but I think intentionally, finding this space for myself that’s right on the edge of the spotlight, where it turns out I really love to be,” he explains. “But this book is about me. So it’s a lot, a lot, a lot more focus than I’m used to.”

But although he’s the subject, the 43-year-old is hesitant to call this his book. “[Heti] said, ‘Let’s write a book,’ and she did the typing, and those are the really hard parts,” he says. To put it more bluntly? “I’m not the author of the book.” Later, he addresses the subject thusly: “I’m a collaborator and I’m the subject.”

The book “belongs to both of us,” Heti writes in an email. “That his name came first wasn’t something either of us put much thought into — or any. Authorship matters less than the fact of collaboration. That’s how the book was made: together. I don’t know why this should be a hard thing for people to get their heads around, but it seems to be. People like books to be written by one person.”

The Chairs Are Where the People Go challenges the idea of authorship. There are different ways of looking at it: One could say Glouberman wrote a book of essays, but got his friend to type it up for him; or, you could see it as Heti — an increasingly experimental writer — writing a book in which someone else comes up with all the words. In some ways, this is a book to be read in concert with How Should a Person Be? In both cases, Heti uses the people around her as material and fashions them into a text. “Sheila has this real interest in the relationship between art and reality that manifests itself in all kinds of ways,” Glouberman explains. “I think that these two books, in her mind, are very connected.”

The book’s subtitle is “How to Live, Work, and Play in the City.” Glouberman, who was born and raised in Montreal, lived in Boston while attending university, found himself in London, England, for a spell in the early ’90s, and has called Toronto home for 15 years, says The Chairs Are Where the People Go is a Toronto book, “but not necessarily for a Toronto audience.”

“It’s tremendously born out of Toronto, and I think it’s incredibly indebted to Toronto, and I think Toronto runs through it,” he says. “[But] my hope is that it’s interesting or accessible to people outside of this city. And that’s something I’d like to see happen more in Toronto … I think this city has some really wonderful sensibilities and ideas, and stuff like that, and I’d like to see them travel a little bit more than it seems like they do.” (To that end, Glouberman and Heti recently embarked on a U.S. tour — the book, it should be noted, is published by the American house Faber and Faber).

Now that he’s shared his opinions with the world, Glouberman is ready to get back to his usual assortment of gigs, which includes teaching classes on subjects ranging from negotiation to improvisation through his Misha Glouberman School of Learning. He’s not sure if there’s another book in his future.

“This one took a long time,” he says. “Not writing, but living.”

• The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman, with Sheila Heti, is published by Faber and Faber ($14.50) The book launches July 27 at The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St. W.